8
Class Consciousness and Culture

One would expect people to remember the past and imagine the future. But in fact when discoursing or writing about history, they imagine it in terms of their own experience, and when trying to gauge the future they cite supposed analogies from the past: till, by a double process of repetition, they imagine the past and remember the future.
—Lewis Namier Conflicts

This study of one small group of rebellious peasants and their migrant kin serves as a critique on the one hand of the grandiose claims made by sweeping studies of class formation and revolution seeking conclusions of a very general nature and, on the other, the claims of those who make much of the microscopic description of cultures, whose ultimate purpose is to render the human condition relative such that exotic peoples starve differently, feel pain differently, die differently, and hence live differently from "us." The study suggests that far too much about the specificity of history and locality is lost in macroscopic studies of rural rebellion that endeavor to assert that this or that type of peasant, proletarian, or even social structure is best suited to rebellion or revolution. Conversely, it suggests too that studies of the minutiae of a people's culture not firmly situated within the context of economic and political relations of exploitation and domination, at regional, national, and international levels simply obscure the essential elements of struggle and resistance inherent in cultural production.^[1]

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred a speech given in Huancayo by a junior minister, a general, or a campaigning politician would have to be sifted through very carefully indeed to find anything of immediate relevance to Huasicanchinos. It would certainly not be through verbal statements that Huasicanchinos would expect to have revealed to them the realities of the state, nor would they assume that the state took verbal expressions on their part very seriously. So the relevance of the state is certainly not made manifest

through verbal statements—in either direction. People go through the motions of making an application to the appropriate ministries for grading the road to the village or recognition of an ambulant syndicate in Lima, but it is other forms of pressure, another kind of political language, which they know makes the most sense. And they know too that the real presence of the state will not be in the coming to fruition of some grand new development scheme announced at a political rally but in the interpretations put on a restrictive aspect of the law by some petty bureaucrat.

This experience of the Huasicanchinos is surely not atypical for the vast majority of poor people in the Third World. True there are always striking cases where some segment or other of the population is to be radically affected by a particular aspect of government policy, and this provides no difficulty for political analysis. It is not hard to study how the scrapping of a favorable trade agreement for the sale of the nation's sugar or coffee, for example, affects sugar or coffee workers. But for most of the people most of the time, political expression cannot be understood in such nicely confined terms without concluding that people have no politics at all, a conclusion that impoverishes the notion of politics as much as our understanding of these people.

And far from this being just the temporary condition of a rather frustrating period of fieldwork over a couple of years, when bureaucrats seemed especially slothful and corrupt, this reality reaches back into the recordable past. It is within this context that political consciousness must be assessed. So instead of assessing its development by bemoaning the sheer cynicism and doggedness of people whose entire lives are spent in this reality, its positive dimensions must be captured. For we are talking here of a space within which a social world is put together if not despite hegemonic definitions of reality, at least in a context where such definitions are shattered into tiny fragments of broken glass, fragments that are sharp, distorting, and dangerous to the touch. Under such circumstances the role of local dialogue in negotiating the interpretation of these fragments in order to assess their immediate or long-term relevance to the peasantry is sufficiently important to render suspect assertions about the political potential of the poor that fail to take this exercise of negotiated interpretation into account. Without such a dimension, "consciousness" becomes a static tableau vivant with no significant creative dynamism, just the possibility of adjusting a figure here or there to reorder the composition of the picture, nothing more.

Aware of the limitations of this perception of consciousness, social and cultural anthropologists have preferred the notion of culture, but they have not thereby found greater precision. Indeed anthropologists have been so defensive about this delicate term that they have kept it isolated in a hothouse, carefully watering it and adjusting its position in the shade, always cautious not to expose it too thoroughly to the winds of a greater historical and geographical reality. As a result, studies of culture tend to be bereft of the criti-

cal features of class relations that cannot be neglected in any contemporary social formation. The failure to integrate cultural studies with class analysis has meant first that anthropologists have only rarely addressed the question of the relationship between the inherent developmental tendencies of certain kinds of social relationships and their implications for consciousness, and second that they have found great difficulty in relating the local cultural distinctiveness of a group being studied within a larger nation-state to the particular class configuration of that nation-state. As a result we are deprived of the possibility of seeing cultural production specifically in terms of simultaneous interdependence and opposition, integration and autonomy at the level of the social formation, not just at the level of the local fieldsite.

It is not possible to separate the problem of the connection between subjective experience on the one side and the objective structures on the other, between praxis and the social constitution of values, between perceptions and meanings, and between institutions from the problem of asymmetrical social relations, from questions of class formation, of the dialectic of historical change and of . . . processes of social, cultural and economic transformation. (Medick 1987: 97)

There have been moments when state policy has been of quite specific relevance to the Huasicanchinos. Although it is important to remember that those moments were precisely a response to local initiatives, it is nevertheless worth seeing how the Huasicanchinos in turn then responded to this spotlight of attention. The Huasicanchinos' immediate and daily grievances stemming from relationships with Hacienda Tucle in the early 1960s were met by official statements that a thoroughgoing land reform was about to go into effect, though little was said specifically about expropriation of the large haciendas. This gave rise to intense discussion among Huasicanchinos during which a wide range of possible interpretations of the prevailing situation were exercised. Eventually the Huasicanchinos made what might be called a forceful political statement: they occupied stretches of disputed land. Promises of reform if they removed themselves then gave rise to further interpretations of reality, and in the last section of the previous chapter we saw in some detail various manifestations of this heightened discourse among the Huasicanchinos. Eventually, however, they chose to stick with their own land reform in favor of promises of a state-run one, at some time in the indefinite future. This led to arrests, imprisonment, violence, and very real fear on their part: feelings no doubt as emotionally pregnant as a circumcision, face-scarring, or other manifestations of "cultural specificity." And these were feelings quite familiar to Huasicanchinos. Indeed they are experiences quite routinely expected by highland peasants in Peru and probably by poor rural people throughout the world.

Then, after the Huasicanchinos had thoroughly reduced the local hacienda

and, again as a result of similar local initiatives elsewhere in the central Andes, a military government expropriated the entire bloc of haciendas in the region, and the question was raised of Huasicancha throwing in its land with the neighboring communities and joining the resulting cooperative, "SAIS Cahuide." Even though this production cooperative was the focus of much propaganda and there were reasonably convincing promises of development projects being carried out on the cooperative (while Huasicancha was now ostentatiously excluded from any small local improvement schemes), the community never seriously entertained the possibility of joining.

Most of the Huasicanchinos' political expression then should not be seen out of the context of these conditions, conditions in which state policy is generally negative or irrelevant. Their political action and what specific identity they derive from engagement in that action arise precisely from these conditions. Whichever way you look at it, therefore, whether as a political analyst seeking out the coefficients of political mobilization or as an anthropologist concerned with the production of culture, the very specificity of this situation matters. Insofar as what we are talking of here is very real, open, and at times bloody confrontation with the dominant power bloc, which has more or less support from the state from one time to another, it is patently ridiculous to suggest that such confrontation is irrelevant to class analysis because it is too local, too primordial or too "exceptional." Rigorous class analysis can only lose from such myopia. However, to suggest that Huasicanchino culture is comprehensible without regard to this much larger political reality is equally absurd. The production and reproduction of culture for any people in the modern world is an intensely political affair.

I have tried to get at this particular process in the previous chapters. In chapter 2 I suggested that for many years the social relations of production among the highland pastoralists were not thoroughly destroyed but built upon by those in power. The effect was to give an appearance of continuity to community institutions while in fact transforming them to serve new purposes. Then, in chapter 6, by reference to materials in the previous chapter, I showed why the preservation of certain particularistic relationships can serve a wide range of interests in diverse forms of domestic enterprise. While at one level it is taken for granted that customs and practices serve agreed-upon goals, at another, the heterogeneity of enterprises means that there is in fact a plasticity in meaning. So one reason why Huasicanchino political expression took the form it did was that key institutions remained in place while transformations in their meaning and practice occurred at first as a result of articulation with more dominant systems and then as a function of internal heterogeneity.

But reference only to the social and economic requirements for life to go on from day to day is not enough. I therefore suggested that incidents of political engagement should not be artificially separated from these social relations of production. In the case of Huasicancha, political mobilization has brought

into play existing institutions to serve the purposes of the political struggle. This was the case for the subsistence techniques used by the montoneras, discussed in chapter 3; and it is revealed time and again in the land recuperation campaigns discussed in the previous chapter. The use of institutions in times of political struggle itself modifies the institutions, but it also gives a political dimension to the preservation of those institutions in subsequent periods of quiescence. Community institutions not only serve a daily livelihood function: they also become inseparable from the political identity and survival of the participants.

This provides a thoroughgoing link between the Huasicanchinos' livelihood and their political activity. There is another such link, too. For I have stressed not only that there is a slippage between the practice of an institution and what is accepted as its orthodox meaning but also that the heterogeneity of Huasicanchino enterprises has given people a variety of lenses through which they perceive what is the orthodox meaning of an institution. In the process of intensive political engagement a dialogue emerges over such matters and the more essential the institution is perceived to be for people's lives, the more thoroughly are they committed to this dialogue, and this gave form to Huasicancha's campaign. Then, because the campaign was articulated through this ongoing interaction both at the level of the meaning and that of the practice of institutions bound up with the "community," political engagement had the effect of modifying the idiom of community and at the same time investing it with contemporary relevance and vitality.

The Facets of Experience

Inasmuch as the struggle over land revolved around "the community of Huasicancha," it included groups as apparently different as destitute "peones" from the village and petty commodity producers resident in Lima. The question arises then, as to how this particular experience of political engagement relates to the Huasicanchinos' sense of themselves—their identity. I believe that this has to do with their experience but that the methods we use for studying experience predispose us to highlight certain elements of experience over others and that, unwittingly, "political peasants" collude in this exercise.

Thoughout the preceding pages I have treated the notion of experience very broadly, whether I was presenting the Huasicanchinos' shadowy and possibly hypothetical pre-Columbian past, their experience of work simultaneously in the community and on the haciendas, or their experience of guerrilla fighting against outsiders variously conceived. Moreover, through case material, I have shown the diversity of the Huasicanchinos' ordinary, daily round as it is today. And finally, I have described their contemporary, lived experience

of political engagement. While these elements of experience are kept separate from one chapter to another, in essence no such separation is possible. Experience of the past suffuses the present; experience of political engagement draws attention to one element in the daily round and not another and so on.

What the evidence from the Huasicancha case suggests is that structural determinants of agency and the conscious experience those agents have as they engage in attempts to reestablish, maintain, or expand the conditions necessary for their livelihoods, are dialectically interconnected. To focus only on the way in which social relations once entered into, then ineluctibly unfold to give form to actors' subjectivity, would seem to miss a very important component of what was happening among the Huasicanchinos. Equally, to focus entirely on the Huasicanchinos' conscious experience of political struggle is to obscure the extent to which the struggle itself occurred as a result of unfolding contradictions of a structural kind, for example, between peasant enterprises in the process of commodification and a hacienda in the process of becoming a capitalist farm.

This study has continually shown how the unfolding of social relations structured in a certain way gave rise to tensions and inevitable contradictions. I have also stressed the importance of self-consciously felt and recorded historical experience too. Hence in chapters 4 and 5 I referred not only to the structural features of the Huasicanchinos' enterprises but also to their past experiences as herders, traders, and so on. But I have argued just as strongly that structural determinants hold no primacy in class formation over the agency of actors engaging in political struggle. Thus, in chapter 3, far from preceding our discussion of the uprising of the montonera decade with a discussion of prevailing social relations of production, I showed that community/hacienda social relations at the end of the last century must be understood by reference to the preconditions that lay in the experience of political struggle throughout the 1880s.

I have argued too, for a more hidden notion of experience, suggesting that relationships engaged in over the weeks and years have consequences that occur behind the backs of people in a way which actually contributes to their subjectivity as the agents of history. This was especially clear in the discussion of simple commodity production and community in chapter 6. But it underlies a proposition asserted throughout that agents negotiate the effective meaning of keywords referring to essential institutions. The notion that meanings are negotiated is not new to anthropology (see, for example, Bailey 1969) and has achieved renewed expression in the work of Marshall Sahlins (1985). But, rather than seeing this as an interesting cultural phenomenon sui generis I ground its occurrence among the Huasicanchinos in a materialistic interpretation of their reproduction vis-à-vis the overall society and economy.

In the recent past, this experience of slippage between the "proper mean-

ing" of an institution and its actual institutionalized practice in any one instance has occurred for essentially two interconnected reasons. First, commodified social relations have not wiped away preexisting social relations but have been grafted onto them. Hence, as Huasicanchinos continue to use institutions of communal labor, the adoption of children, labor exchange, and so on, referring to each by its traditional name, the underlying logic of commodified relations undermines the older meanings. In doing so, it not only opens the way for a gap between orthodoxy and practice but also contributes to the sense of identity of the actors themselves. It reconstitutes them as agents.

Second, the Huasicanchino form of production is heterogeneous. Hence the areas of social reproduction affected by commodification—be they access to credit, mobilization of labor, or the constitution of land as property—vary from one enterprise to the next. So the way in which traditional notions of an institution are undermined in practice vary among Huasicanchinos.^[2] The effect of confronting outsiders over access to the resources upon which all these institutions (however interpreted) are dependent, is to call attention to precisely these different resonances in meaning. Less than resolving the issue in a timeless fixity, however, political engagement for the Huasicanchinos served to intensify discourse that then itself gave to political engagement its own momentum.

Hence Huasicanchino history cannot be understood without stressing the heightened self-consciousness people acquire as they engage in political struggle. This is a view endorsed by E. P. Thompson (1968, 1978), but by excluding as it does the unintended and often immediately hidden consequences of social relations once entered into, this notion of experience is at once too narrow and too vague.^[3] We therefore require both structural and expressive components of experience in the formation of identity. Yet, for Thompson, because structural tensions are themselves bereft of any dynamic impetus, the task of history is always left to the conscious agency of class actors:

To put it bluntly: classes do not exist as separate entities, look around, find an enemy class, and then start to struggle. On the contrary, people find themselves in a society structured [sic ] in determined ways, (crucially, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over those they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes , they come to know this discovery as class-consciousness. Class and class-consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in the real historical process . But if we employ a static category of class, or if we derive our concept from a prior theoretical model of structural totality, we will not suppose so: we will suppose that class is instantaneously present (derivative like a geometric projection, from production relations) and that hence classes struggle. (1978: 149)

Yet what for Thompson is the end product of an historical enquiry, for Brenner constitutes the sine qua non without which it is impossible to begin such an enquiry.

In a seminal article (1976) on the role of class conflict in social change in preindustrial Europe, Brenner develops his argument from an a priori structural view of class relationships:

Class structure . . . has two analytically distinct, but historically unified, aspects. First, the relations of direct producers to one another, to their tools and to the land in the immediate process of production—what has been called the "labour process" or the "social forces of production." Second, the inherently conflictive relations of property—always guaranteed directly or indirectly, in the last analysis, by force—by which an unpaid-for part of the product is extracted from the direct producers—which might be called the "property relationship" or the "surplus-extraction relationship." (1976: 31)

These two elements of class relations are conventionally referred to as the "forces of production" and the "relations of production." The first element links people together within the process of production, and the second element, as Brenner stresses, locks them into conflictive relations.

For the purpose of clarifying my approach to the history of the Huasicanchinos, two points need to be stressed here. First, it is to be noted that both elements are necessary for the constitution of class relationships. Any conflictive relationship, however structurally inevitable it may be, is not thereby a class conflict, and any relationship that links people together in some shared experience is also not thereby necessarily a class experience. Secondly, Brenner places less stress on the fact that all these relationships—however much they may be the products of properties inherent in structure—are at some level or another experienced relationships , and while their underlying dynamism may have all kinds of historical significance, it is at this level of experience that they become of sociological interest.

Brenner then goes on to say,

It is around the property or surplus-extraction relationship that one defines the fundamental classes in a society—the class(es) or direct producers on the one hand and the surplus-extracting, or ruling [sic ], class(es) on the other. It would be my argument then that different class structures, specifically property relations or surplus extraction relations, once established, tend to impose rather strict limits and possibilities, indeed rather specific long-term patterns, on a society's economic development. (1976: 31)

It is the suggestion that class structures , already defined in terms bereft of the experience of actual political struggle, impose rather specific long-term patterns on development, which give to this position its structuralist character. It is a position which Thompson finds loaded with mystification, for while

he is prepared to acknowledge that society is structured in determined ways, he is innocent of the notion of structural contradictions and the tensions that emerge from them.^[4] Nevertheless, the evidence from this study suggests that certain social relations are so structured as to impose at least some developmental logic of their own.

After all, in chapter 6, I paused in the ethnographic narrative to bring together some of the threads of the Huasicanchinos' livelihood in order to show why the Huasicanchinos came together as Huasicanchinos prior to the political engagement of the 1960s, and I did so by arguing that this was explicable in terms of the structural requirements of certain of their forms of production. For all that, there was still something lacking: the contribution to their lives of the experience of political engagement itself, and yet the evidence from Huasicancha suggests that, through the centuries (as Thompson has suggested for other circumstances) political engagement has had its own history. And once they experience those tensions, which arise from the kind of contradictions Brenner describes, this history has given the Huasicanchinos the tools with which to bring their agency to bear, thus modifying (more or less radically) the determination of those contradictions.

I have tried in this book to interlace these two faces of experience without giving undue weight to the one or the other. Indeed, I have tried as best I could to dissolve the distinction between the one and the other. What often appears to be an especially newsworthy "political" act of resistance may best be seen as just one moment in a long trajectory in which livelihood and resistance are interwoven. So I have sought to provide both the stuff of daily life and the stuff of political action as one of a piece in the interrelations of people with one another.^[5]

Though Thompson can be criticized then for the vagueness of his notion of experience (Anderson 1980: 16–58), we should be cautious about abandoning it altogether, for it captures something not quite embraced by anything else. Experience, for example, might be part of culture but it is not the same thing. It is hard to avoid the sense that there is something rather specific, rather ungeneralizable, about the Huasicanchino experience when, as one picks one's way along a hazardous mountain path illicitly to pasture sheep, one is given a gentle nudge and then a nod of the head toward a spot where the rocks are outlined against the sky, there to see the figure of a caporal on patrol. Or watching as an ambulant fruitseller in Lima upturns his barrow of fruit to be gathered up by passers-by rather than allow the arresting policeman to sell it off later. Or listening as three or four people share in the account of how fulano de tal (some person) was found in hiding, captured, and taken off to prison, liberally changing one "fact" for another with apparent indifference. These are matters equally of daily life and, in Tilly's useful expression, matters of contention: they are matters too that have the effect—intended or

not—of asserting one thing and negating another. And once the specificity of the Huasicanchinos' experience becomes apparent so it becomes difficult to interpret the texture of their daily interactions and the way in which their domestic enterprises have developed without taking into account the constant presence of these very obvious and eminently describable experiences. Then again those more describable experiences themselves seem naked when taken out of the context of a more obvious and hence less visible kind of experience—the experience of the daily round of shepherding, weaving, trading, migrating once and then again . . . and so on.

And yet these are not all experiences of the same kind; experience is a multifaceted word, as we discover if we turn to the dictionary:

1. direct personal participation or observation [sic ]; actual knowledge or contact: experience of prison life .

2. a particular [sic ] incident, feeling etc., that a person has undergone: an experience to remember .

3. accumulated knowledge, especially of practical matters: a man of experience .

4. the impact made on an individual by the culture of a people, nation etc.: the American experience .

5. Philosophy: the totality of a person's perceptions, thoughts, memories and encounters.^[6]

Though most studies of experience are probably aimed at the last of these, that is, the entry that embraces all the others, our difficulties are suggested by Item 1, which most closely preserves the Latin root (experiri : to prove) which "experience" shares with "experiment" (experience as a special form of observation). Item 2 takes the precise reverse position from experimental observation, being explicitly subjective. Though it is not my intention to enter into fine analytic exposition, far from encouraging me to disaggregate the term, the dictionary serves to reassure me that the multifaceted sense I had already accumulated of "experience" is not idiosyncratic but rather that the interconnectedness of these senses should be preserved.

Experience is not only something that happens in the past but something in which we participate from moment to moment. And experience is not only something to which we can consciously give form and describe, like a political confrontation on the pampa, but also the daily affairs that are so taken for granted that they escape our notice and thus elude description. As the various disciplines have attempted to study, and then talk about, experience, however, they have faced methodological problems that have had the effect of laying theoretical emphasis on one of these dimensions over the others.

For example, when conflict occurs between groups it gives rise to the negotiation of meanings within groups. Thus in the previous chapter we saw contentiousness provoking heightened political discourse (cf., Jones 1983: 90–178; Foster 1985) that itself created a momentum of its own. It seems to me that this was an especially intense period of cultural production. Yet this dimension of political engagement is lost as that experience becomes translated into accounts appropriate to the task of relating "what happened" in the past. Insofar as they become narratable history, events that were essentially incomplete, uncertain as to their outcome and unclear in the role played by participants, must conform to the requirements of narrative while not belying what can patently be seen to have happened. Hence, as accounts gain a closer approximation to narrative, so the role of participants becomes clearer, the outcome more certain, and the event itself more complete. Not only is there a tendency for hermetic closure to occur such that an account becomes the account and thence "the facts," but in conforming to the structures of narrative, disproportionate emphasis is placed on central characters (leaders) and the unity and homogeneity of followers.

In contrast, however, to the closure of this kind of narrative account, offered in response to inquiries from the visiting historian, vivid accounts of past events were themselves part of the heightened critical discourse taking place during political engagement. And here the deepened commitment participants have in how such accounts are interpreted gives rise to the ongoing and hence perpetually incomplete and negotiable nature of cultural production, while nevertheless restraining interpretations within the confines of very real conditions, testable in the outcome of political strategy.

Living with the Huasicanchinos during quite intense moments (or soon thereafter) convinces me of this; I find it hard, however, to reproduce the myriad facets of cultural production thus engendered within the exercise of political praxis. By referring to just one idea, that of landed property, I will try nevertheless to convey both the very definite limits and also the more immediately apparent dynamic properties inherent in the discourse which arises within a group of people engaged in a political engagement against others. In the case of the Huasicanchinos it is clear that, over the course of time, engagement in political struggles and interaction with changing economic conditions have together led to the reformulation of key institutions and hence the meaning of words used to talk about those institutions. But insofar as that engagement has not been uniformly shared by all, so the reformulations have varied and the role of manipulation through discourse, in contributing to further reformulation, becomes manifest. At the end of the day this entire set of activities becomes as much the precondition of the social relations of petty production as it is the result.^[7]

The Role of Structure, Political Engagement and Discourse: an Example

The political conflict that arose between Hacienda Tucle and the Huasicanchinos reflected a major structural contradiction of the kind referred to by Brenner for preindustrial Europe. Once that conflict arose, however, heightened discourse within the ranks of the Huasicanchinos occurred as a result of the variety of Huasicanchino units of production, and this complexity of social relations often prevented the logical unfolding inherent in any one set of relations when taken on its own (in chap. 6, the case of commodification was more thoroughly discussed). Moreover, once Huasicanchinos addressed themselves to the demands of the political struggle, this too, worked against emerging internal contradictions.

Nevertheless we cannot deny the power of unfolding internal contradictions. Despite the Huasicanchinos' perpetual manipulations of the bounds of the domestic sphere, of the use of kin, of community sentiment and so on, the contradiction between the property form necessary for simple commodity production on the one hand and the peasant economy on the other was fundamental. Whereas community property involves the right to a flow of income from a specific resource and is contingent on certain social performances, limited and fragmented between holders, all of whom have rights in the same physical good, commodified property is confined to one owner and not tied to social performance. Simple commodity production requires this latter idea of absolute property at least in some of its material goods and can be far more rationalized where this can be extended to possession of livestock and—most crucial of all—land.

Of course, what precipitated land invasions against Hacienda Tucle were the administrator's attempts to restrict access to clearly delimited areas of territory and to convert "rights of entry" into wages, i.e., a move toward absolute property. Much of the confusion that followed in subsequent efforts to find settlements arose, not because the Huasicanchinos uniformly opposed this view of property, but because many of the better-off Huasicanchinos were already practicing such forms of possession. Moreover the essence of these people's conflict with Tucle derived from their growing realization that they could only establish such property rights of their own once Tucle was reduced or eliminated. For this reason simple commodity producers showed a keen interest in the direction of the land recuperation campaign that extended itself to their seeking leadership positions. Meanwhile the "proper" (i.e., "traditional") use of the concept of property served political purposes both in terms of internal cohesion and the external presentation of the Huasicancha case.

Contradictions in these two forms of property, therefore, expressed themselves in Huasicancha through heightened discourse revolving around property and periodic crises when the clarity of the contradiction was forced to the fore. Such crisis invariably took the form of a turnover in the official leadership of the campaign. This was especially clear in the dismissal of both Tacunan as personero and the more established migrants who were his associates. Conversely, where such clarity was avoided in favor of more generalized and undefined references to possession, independent farmers were able to secure and retain political offices as representatives of the group as a whole, as was the case for Urbano at the end of the campaign.

But if the development of absolute forms of property among Huasicanchinos had the effect of making various independent farmers interested in the direction of the campaign, the continuation of contingent and fragmented property had the effect of giving widely dispersed participants an interest in the struggle through their confederation links back to the village. For the confederations of households were initially emergent from just such forms of property. And it was, after all, the existence of these confederations, spanning Huancayo, La Oroya, and Lima that most directly kept migrant ex-residents interested in land and livestock in and around Huasicancha.

It will be recalled that quite complex interrelationships of ownership were common among confederations of households. A shop assistant in Huancayo might also be a "socio " (partner) in a pig farm in Lima, a truck in Huancayo, and a marketstall in La Oroya. The more thoroughly livestock were interspersed across a variety of flocks shepherded by different households, the more healthy the confederation was said to be. These various practices had a significant effect on the definition of the domestic sphere: confederations themselves were seen by participants as a modified version of an institution in which one household was dispersed widely over terrain to gain full advantage of the vertical ecology. Therefore, if the contemporary versions of the confederations rarely reflect perfectly this ideal, they nevertheless benefit from a common understanding of what I can only refer to as "the proper usage" of what the institution "ought to be like"—a resonance from a commonly understood experience of the past.

And yet, even in the past, it was rarely households per se that stretched across the complementary zones of the ecology but a community of households (see chap. 2). These households, moreover, in the course of time, came to specialize in the agriculture of specific zones. What is more, the past also provides evidence of local leaders, going back to the days of the curacas, using the lack of precision between family and community to gain access to community labor for the benefit of their own households: the sphere of "all my kin" was strategically manipulated. And this manipulation was made possible by the contingent and fragmented nature of property.

A "special advantage" through reducing labor costs can be had then, for some households, by reducing reciprocal obligations (drawing in the family) while at the same time increasing the reciprocal rights due one (extending the net of "those who love me"). In the past this has been most effectively done through the use of political office within the community. And this not too far into the distant past. For one thing the fetishization of character and skill that predated commodity fetishism meant that those with skill and knowledge were obliged to put it at the disposal of the community.^[8] They did this by taking office, and they were repaid by the community's obligations to them.

More recently successful independent farmers and urban petty commodity producers have been placed in positions of authority for similar reasons and accepted the task for similar purposes. But their special advantage results from their skill in privatizing certain elements of the production unit while continuing to take advantage of the dispersed forms of property and labor deriving from the community. The most striking combination of these is livestock and land. Because Huasicancha's pasture is common property it is available to all, contingent only on community membership. Once livestock are systematically raised through careful breeding and use of medications etc., then they become a source of continual accumulation restricted only by the amount of land available. But as long as such systematic accumulation takes place through the extended system of the confederations and the various complex ties between the members of a highland estancia, as was the case for Grimaldo and Angelina (chap. 5), then the benefits of accumulation are to some extent dispersed. Moreover, insofar as the limitations on accumulation in this century have primarily been the result of limited land, the manifest hindrance comes from where it is controlled—in recent times not the community but the hacienda.

With the paying of a wage to peones or the increased exploitation of the immediate domestic labor of the household, in lieu of these more extended ties, then accumulation is concentrated. And this was the tendency most prevalent in the case of Urbano and Paulina (chap. 5). The area within which it is concentrated may vary in fact (e.g., to just the household head or just the adult couple) but ideologically it is restricted to a precisely delineated domestic sphere. Accumulated livestock take up ever larger amounts of pasture but do not benefit ever more extensive personnel. The comparative advantage of such a household does not therefore derive from a characteristic that can be put to the community's advantage—skill-knowledge—through being made available for the benefit of all, as in the past, but precisely from restricting the amount of capital to a defined sphere and, in the case of land, specifically at the expense of the amount of common good remaining available to others. This is a patently unresolvable fact: a contradiction to human resourcefulness. To dismiss it on the grounds that it is not clearly articulated in the discourse

of locals is not just to blind oneself to an important element of social reality but to deny oneself the possibility of asking how it was continually obscured and why; whenever political and economic conjunctures forced a clarification it threatened a crisis in the political struggle against Tucle.

I have suggested in the previous section that this process can best be understood by recognizing the multifaceted resonances of keywords on the one hand and political conjunctures that serve to expose this variation on the other, giving rise to a heightened internal discourse. Even so, by referring here to the question of land, we see that it was not just the heightened discourse among Huasicanchinos that gave momentum to their political mobilization, but what that heightened discourse was about: the perpetual need for the land being held by the hacienda. Political discourse must be seen then as neither a superstructure enslaved by its appropriate economic base nor as the autonomous activity of somehow objectively-conscious subjects standing back from the conditions of their existence and coldly weighing "the facts at hand."

If the Huasicanchinos alone are far too small a group to call a class, we are nonetheless talking about the stuff from which classes emerge: from making statements (in a variety of "languages" from various forms of discourse, to making physical threats, to carrying them out)—against some, with others, and among themselves. Nevertheless if we dissociate the Huasicanchinos' political resistance from structural determinations, as Thompson would have it, then we find classes the moment we find struggles, and it becomes impossible to distinguish between alliances of temporary political convenience—popular fronts, if you like—and struggles that will do precisely what Thompson would have them do: crystallize—in my view through discourse—what is to be the class coming into formation.

Moreover, it is only through maintaining this linkage between the imperatives of social relations and consciously engaged-in political contention, that we are able to clarify a term which, in contemporary usage, has become confused. Thus when one talks of everyday forms of resistance, it is not always clear whether the resistance being referred to is the "irresistable force" type or the "immoveable object" type, a conscious act or an inherent capacity to withstand. A reference to "peasant resistance to capitalism," for example, may mean properties inherent in peasant social relations that make them resistant to capitalism (see Friedmann 1980 or Taussig 1982) or peasants' conscious acts of resistance, which, though not necessarily subjectively perceived as being directed against capitalism, can be interpreted as such (Hobsbawm 1959, 1984: 15–32; Wolf 1969; Scott and Kerkvliet 1973). I have not attempted to show simply that certain peasant enterprises have an inherent capacity deriving from their structure to resist capitalist social relations, nor to show simply that certain peasant attitudes encourage them to resist, rather I

have shown precisely the way in which the one form of resistance is linked to the other.

James Scott (1986) is one of the few writers who has turned attention to forms of rural resistance that do not in themselves amount to major revolutionary transformations. Yet, it seems to me that because he does not link the structural determinants of social relations to the kind of conscious acts of resistance he focuses on—indeed in the absence of an especially rigorous notion of class at all—he is led towards a kind of Lewis Carroll riddle as to whether peasants say what they mean or mean what they say: can pilfering and sabotage be packaged together as forms of resistance if the one is selfish in intent and the other altruistic? This focus on the motivations of the individual peasant cut adrift from the wide variety of social relations in which he or she is embedded forces Scott to argue that acts performed in self-interest—such as deserting from the Tsarist army—can have just as great implications for resistance as those performed for group interest. Such a view not so much contradicts the views of Marx or Lenin as stops at the gates of their question, which was to try to ascertain the way in which individual interests might become those of an entire class and vice versa.

It almost seems as though Scott is abandoning the phenomenological element he ascribed to his earlier approach (1976) in favor of the peasant as strategizing individual, so that when he says "self-interest" we must read "individual self-interest" and what becomes something needing explanation is how selfishly motivated individuals, engaging in individual acts of defiance, can be the basis for more concerted resistance. The selfishly motivated individual seems to be incompatible with the unity and solidarity required of proper resistance. This is by no means a view confined to Scott (who anyway goes on to explain very well why this contradiction is only apparent, not real); it is one that is commonly held. And yet is a certain kind of self-confident individualism incompatible with solidarity in times of struggle? Interestingly, pressed by an outsider to explain, in retrospect, the success of their own campaign and the very few backsliders, Huasicanchinos will ascribe it to "unity" (unión ), and hence appear to collude in an emphasis on the ability of a well-established collective will to overcome egoistic self-interest. And yet precisely what gave form to the political activity and created the momentum that carried it forward was that people were thoroughly engaged in asserting what they saw to be their self-interests and, moreover, felt a confidence in their own abilities to articulate those interests in the forum of open debate. What "community" existed among Huasicanchinos was of the kind described well by Sabean (1984: 29–30): "What is shared in community is not shared values or common understanding, so much as the fact that members of a community are engaged in the same argument, the same raisonement , the same Rede , the same discourse, in which alternative strategies, misunderstandings, con-

flicting goals and values are threshed out. . . . What makes community is the discourse." It is only in accounts retrospectively constructed that people reduce themselves to passive followers united in agreement behind a single-minded leader. At the time of political contention itself the link between individual and collective will is more dynamic, a process which Gramsci referred to as "the cultural aspect" of political struggle: "An historical act can only be performed by 'collective man,' and this presupposes the attainment of a 'cultural-social' unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world (1976: 348). This welding together of dispersed wills engaged in the same argument, in which strategies, misunderstandings and goals are threshed out, is the process of cultural production that I have tried to examine here, while grounding it in the imperatives of social relations.

Local Knowledge

I initially went to Peru to study an example of successful rural resistance in which outside influences, such as leadership and institutional support, were not present. I sought out a situation where resistance was actually taking place rather than one that had concluded some time in the past, and I set my sights on the Huasicanchinos. I felt that the intensive fieldwork associated with social anthropology could provide detailed material on the characteristics of rural resistance that was unavailable to studies conducted on a much larger scale or to historical studies dependent on accounts of past events.

Once having met Huasicanchinos in Huancayo and in Huasicancha itself, I found that there was no difficulty in getting them to talk to me about their resistance. Indeed it was hard to get them to talk of anything else. But I was struck especially by the thin line between getting by and total disaster. Their lives seemed to me so perpetually precarious. As I talked to them about this perception, I soon discovered that—surprised though they were by my interest—for them too this was a ceaseless preoccupation. Yet gathering data related to livelihood was far more difficult than acquiring material on the land invasions. So much was taken for granted. By contrast, aware of the disparities between us with respect to their beliefs about the hill spirits or the rituals surrounding curing practices, informants took very little for granted. But except for a few rather specific occasions, beliefs and rituals were of little interest to Huasicanchinos. What I have discussed in this book, then, is a product of my own initial interests as they were modified by my encounter with the Huasicanchinos. And this encounter provoked me to connect the characteristics of the Huasicanchinos' resistance to the way they made a liv-

ing. But there are limitations to adding this very intimate and detailed evidence to broader studies.

I have wanted to learn something very specific about precisely what kind of "direct producers" they were who engaged in the land recuperation campaign and about their differing roles at particular stages of the campaign. I found that regardless of any "economic" differences, engagement in the political struggle itself carried people along and influenced their involvement. These issues are of some interest when compared to studies like Hobsbawm and Rude's (1973) of the Swing uprisings in Britain, Stedman Jones's essay (1983) on the Chartists, Eric Wolf's study (1969) of the role of peasants in twentieth-century revolutions, or Charles Tilly's (1986) study of "the contentious French." But the Huasicanchino campaigns were not the basis of a subsequent revolution. Indeed the guerrilla movements aiming at revolution in the central Andes in the 1960s were strikingly disconnected from these kinds of spontaneous local initiatives (Bejar 1970). Nor was their shared discourse as widespread as was the Chartists'. Indeed the extremely local referrents in discourse are a notable feature of the Huasicanchino campaigns. And the absence of comparative data makes it hazardous to guess whether the Huasicanchino land invasions of the 1960s can exemplify the very widespread spontaneous insurgency in the central Andes of this period.^[9]

What is striking, however, is how much we learn about participants in a long-sustained resistance campaign by attending to their specificity. It would be foolhardy to question the value of studies carried out at a much broader level (for example, Barrington Moore 1966; Wolf 1969; Skocpol 1979). But it is equally foolhardy to accept these broader studies without paying close attention to the evidence drawn from more detailed microscopic studies of such very widely divergent cases as say, LeRoy Ladurie's (1975) Montaillou , Warman's (1980) We Come to Object , Mintz's (1982) The Anarchists of Casas Viejas , or Sider's (1986) Culture and Class in Anthropology and History . Yet the kind of knowledge that emerges from this different sort of material means that much is lost when these cases are used for the purpose of broad generalization. Rather these latter studies would seem to confirm that we must seek out the origins of the class consciousness of the oppressed in locally specific forms of cultural identity.

In the case of Huasicancha, it is difficult to see how one could separate out those aspects of the local culture that are directly related to these people's opposition to a prevailing hegemony and those which are not. In this sense, it is quite reasonable in my view to refer to Huasicancha's culture as preeminently a "culture of opposition." It is striking for example how cultural production in Huasicancha contrasts with that described by Sider (1986) for Newfoundland. As long as we are careful not to see in all manifestations of cultural specificity expressions of real or potential opposition to the homoge-

nizing effects of a dominant hegemony, then this observation provides a useful dimension to our understanding of the emergence of a politically significant class consciousness. While there is no doubt that the local nature of this culture of opposition prevents it from itself being an expression of consciousness of class, it seems obvious that the seeds for a more broadly based oppositional class consciousness are there and will inevitably influence any subsequent political participation. To this extent an understanding of the specificity of cultures of opposition is an essential part of class analysis, and it is to be emphasized that it is only attainable through attending to the details of historical and geographical variation, which are too easily lost in broader studies.